This Is Not a Film

May 24, 2017 — The Cannes Film Festival always kicks up a flurry of announcements of projects in the works. Now that we’ve just passed the halfway mark, let’s have a look at some of the more interesting titles we’ve heard about so far.“Robert...

Jan 23, 2017 — One of the most striking elements of Something Wild, Jack Garfein’s psychologically complex examination of trauma and attachment, is the 1960s New York City its distressed characters inhabit. Shot by Eugen Schüfftan, an Oscar-winning German cinematographer renowned for the special-effects...

May 11, 2016 — Repertory PicksTonight, as part of the month-long series Rossellini: Restored and Revisited, the Austin Film Society in Austin, Texas, will screen Roberto Rossellini’s 1950 existential masterpiece Stromboli. Starring the radiant Ingrid Bergman, the film was the pair’s first screen collaboration,...

Jul 6, 2015 — The Killers (1946) is exemplary film noir from Robert Siodmak, who, on the strength of three films—this, Phantom Lady (1944), and Criss Cross (1949)—stands beside his fellow European exiles Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger as one of noir’s crucial directors....

Dec 16, 2013 — Here at last comes the time of ecstasy, of trances.Those who refuse to their senses the gift of trances shall wither.Brothers in trances, when will freedom come?They threw me out of my land and country.May my star shine. [. ....

May 7, 2013 — Blame it on the Madison. Or blame it on Arthur, Franz, and Odile’s gleeful race through the Louvre in an attempt to break the world record (held by an American, of course) for the quickest visit ever. Blame it on...

Nov 21, 2012 — In his films as well as his poems, novels, and short stories, Pier Paolo Pasolini evinced a love of vernacular speech, often choosing to write in the slangy argots of the working class and the dispossessed. He made his adaptation...

Aug 27, 2012 — There are disturbing movie scenes, and then there are disturbing movie scenes. The following, from Norman Mailer’s Maidstone, is not for the faint of heart. The 1970 film is the ultimate example of Mailer’s cinematic philosophy, which held that a...

Jul 19, 2012 — I want to start with my favorite story about Carole Lombard. She began her career in Hollywood in her teens and, as we know, was very attractive. She found herself hounded by the wolves of Tinseltown but came up with...

Apr 17, 2012 — When it was first released in 1977, ¡Alambrista! depicted something previously unseen in American fiction films—the lives of undocumented Mexican immigrants from their point of view. Though writer-director-cinematographer Robert M. Young was not Latino and didn’t speak Spanish, his film convincingly...